The whole lot reeked of new money. I’d been to places like this before, in my past life. Some of the times I’d been welcome, sometimes not. I had a feeling this was going to be one of the nots.
“We need Hooper for this, Slow,” I said.
“He’s tagged, Stones. He’s got another year to go for that last job they done him for.”
“Are you telling me those tags don’t go wrong sometimes?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
“Get me Hooper, then. And tell him it’s got to be tonight.”
21
Yes, I was definitely getting paranoid. When I saw there was a car parked opposite Lisa’s house that I didn’t recognise, my first thought was of Craig’s crew watching me, making sure I carried out my part of the deal. Deal? More like blackmail.
There was no one in the car just now, but they’d be around somewhere. Mentally, I gave them a wave. Look, I’m doing my bit, like the deal says. But if you hurt Lisa, you’re dead, pal.
Lisa wasn’t home, though, no matter how much I knocked. Again I found myself peering through windows. I could practically smell the pot pourri, as if her spirit was lurking there. I rang my home number to get the messages from my answer phone. There were no messages from Lisa.
Finally I gave up and drove home. When I went through the e-mails on my computer it was obvious business still wasn’t good. But then I’d been neglecting it these past few days.
So I got to work again. Things to do, arrangements to make. A vital operation to plan. I needed gloves, a balaclava. What else? A torch. Were the batteries working? No. Shit, this isn’t my sort of thing at all.
I jumped when there was a hammering on my door, but it was only Doncaster Dave reporting for duty. He stood on the doorstep chewing a bar of chocolate, like a huge kid wanting me to come out and play. I had to find a way of telling him he wasn’t coming with us tonight. He would only be a liability.
We drove along Sherwood Crescent, down First Avenue and out onto Ollerton Road by the shops. There was a faint grey drizzle falling, and women walking towards the bus stops were swinging and dipping their umbrellas with disregard for the safety of other pedestrians. It’s dangerous on the pavements sometimes. Maybe it’s time they got everybody off the pavement and onto the roads.
We pulled into the car park at Cost Cutters and I let Dave push the trolley. I stocked up with some stuff from the freezers and plenty of beer, plus milk and coffee and loo paper. And batteries for the torch.
“I’ll have a job for you tonight, Donc.”
Dave was concentrating on steering the trolley. It looked like a toy in his hands, and it was showing a tendency to shoot madly off in the wrong direction.
“Yeah? We’re going out to this village?”
“Not you, Donc. I want you to go somewhere else.”
“Right.”
It was impossible to tell whether he was disappointed, relieved or just couldn’t care less. The expression on his face didn’t change. Of course, he could just have been trying to thaw out the frozen steak through sheer will power so that he could eat it before we got to the checkout.
“Donc, I want you to go to Lisa’s place and wait for her to come home.”
He nodded. He knew who Lisa was, I think. Even though she hadn’t got tattoos, he’d noticed her around occasionally.
“When you see her, you stay with her. I don’t want anyone getting near her, right?”
“Right.”
A harassed housewife with two kids in tow barged our trolley with hers as she reached across us to grab at the soap powder. Dave gave her a hurt look as she pushed past without a word. It was a cut-throat world in here.
“You can take the Impreza. I won’t be using it tonight. Slow and Metal are getting us something inconspicuous.”
Dave nodded cautiously. He is able to drive, but only at ten miles an hour, because his accelerator foot gets jammed against the floor and his elbows stick out of the windows.
“If necessary, get Lisa in the car and bring her back to Medensworth. For her own safety.”
We got into the queue at the checkout. Dave had gone very quiet. I picked up a handful of chocolate bars from the display by the till and dropped them into the trolley, in case he needed a quick fix of energy. But when it came our turn at the checkout, I saw where his attention had turned to. We’d picked the queue for the heftiest, most muscular checkout girl in the place. Underneath the uniform, she was bound to have tattoos.
I saw Dave admiring the way she shot the barcode reader at each item and how her thick fingers thumped the keys of the till. He seemed charmed by the high pitched screech that came out of her mouth when she announced the total. When I handed over the cash, the bird smiled at him, not me. Amazing.
On the way back from the supermarket, Dave got talkative. It was like that cement toad suddenly flexing its legs and hopping off the porch.
“Stones?”
“Yeah, Donc?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“’Course.”
“Do you think I’m well muscled, or just a fat bastard?”
I thought about this for a minute. If a bloke asks you a serious question like that, it deserves a bit of thought.
“Does it matter?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why?”
“It’s, you know... what people think of you. It’s important sometimes, ain’t it?”
“Donc, have you got off with one of those waitresses you’re always drooling over?”
“Don’t be daft.”
“Because if that’s it, then I’m the wrong person to be giving advice. I don’t give a toss what women think of me. They have to take me or leave me. That’s the way to do it, Donc. Don’t let them get their claws into you, because they’ll try and change you, and it doesn’t do you any good. Are you listening to me, Donc?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“So.”
“So what?”
“Do you think I’m well muscled, or just a fat bastard?”
I sighed, and tried to ignore him for the rest of the walk back to Sherwood Crescent. But the brain’s a funny thing, isn’t it? It was right then that my mind started to put two and two together, the way it does sometimes when there’s no bird or booze to occupy me. It hadn’t seemed important while I was actually at Eddie Craig’s place, but now I started to wonder how his lads had known to visit the Rev to find out where I was holed up. Craig isn’t strictly a local villain — his home manor is Mansfield and Ashfield, where the market for his stuff is. So for information, he must have to rely on local snouts.
I wondered who had tipped him off to tap the Rev for my whereabouts. Who knew that I’d visited St Asaph’s the day before I skipped off? Only my own crew, and one other person.
Yeah, and another thing. Who had been gossiping to Moxon and Stubbs about my private activities, my personal liaisons? I could think of someone who had. And those two someones were one and the same person.
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“Food later. Let’s go visit St Asaph’s for a few minutes.”
The Reverend Bowring came out of the vicarage when he saw us in the churchyard. He was dressed like a chat show host in a bright woolly cardigan. Perfect evening wear for Medensworth.
“Where is your young lady, Livingstone? I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing her for some days. No trouble, I hope?”
“Trouble? You don’t know the half of it, Rev.”
“Oh. Would you like to tell me about it?”
“Not really.”
“Has there been a disagreement between you? Not a permanent estrangement, I trust?”
“To be honest, I think some other bloke’s got her, Rev.”